My dear Sir
I am extremely obliged to you for the map1 which you have been kind enough to send me,2 and on which I readily found the position with which you have been pleased to honour me. It also gratified me much to receive your photograph which is now enrolled in company with some of my best friends. I wish I had an equally good one of myself to send you in return, but the fact is I do not possess the repose necessary to the production of a good photograph. Such as it is however it gives me pleasure to send you mine.
At a meeting of the philosophical club a month ago3 my friend Dr. Hooker showed us some sketches taken by your colleague Dr. Hector,4 and I was much pleased to hear Hooker express in the presence of the Club the high opinion which he entertained of your labours in New Zealand.
I am now working at subjects which would hardly interest you, but if I knew how to send books and papers to you I would in this way inform you as to what I am doing from time to time. I published in the spring of this year a work on heat5 which I should like to present to you & parts of which might excite your interest.
I trust you will long continue to enjoy the health and possess the energy necessary for labours such as yours—goodbye
Yours very sincerely | John Tyndall
Dr. Julius Haast | &c &c &c | Royal Institution 27th. November 1863
Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, MS-Papers Turnbull 0037-143
the map: this refers to Haast’s ‘Map of the Southern Alps in the Province of Canterbury (New Zealand)’, in which he named one of the peaks Mt. Tyndall (there are also peaks named for Darwin, Hooker, Forbes, Stokes, and Ramsay, and glaciers for Faraday, Huxley, Lyell, and Agassiz). Haast later published the map in: J. Haast, ‘Notes to accompany the Topographical Map of the Southern Alps, in the Province of Canterbury, New Zealand’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 40 (1870), pp. 433–41; the map precedes the article).
to send me: letter missing.
meeting of philosophical club a month ago: the Philosophical Club of the RS, founded in 1847, was a rather informal society but one that brought together prominent men of science to dine and enjoy each other’s company. The club had the somewhat peculiar requirement that at least 35 of its stipulated 47 members should reside within a ten-minute walk of the London General Post Office. T. G. Bonney notes in his study of the club that it arose out of dissatisfaction with the direction of the RS, and with its method of election of Fellows in particular—namely, that the chief requirement for Fellows seemed to be that they were ‘well-born, well-dressed, and moderately learned [in science]’ (T. G. Bonney, Annals of the Philosophical Club of the Royal Society, written from its Minute Book (London, Macmillan & Co., 1919), p. v). It is notable that Bonney’s work was published in response to Archibald Geike’s Annals of the Royal Society Club. The Record of a London Dining-Club in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan & Co., 1917). During the 29 October 1863 meeting, Hooker ‘exhibited photographs of drawings by Dr. Hector, made in the South Island of New Zealand, at comparatively low levels above the sea, which showed the effect of glacial action and much resembled similar phenomena in the Himalayas’ (Bonney, Annals of the Philosophical Club of the Royal Society, p. 165). Tyndall had been elected a member of this club on 10 May 1855 (Journal, RI MS JT/2/13c/745).
Dr. Hector: James Hector (1834–1907), a Scottish geologist and naturalist, known for his lengthy political and scientific careers in New Zealand. One of his major contributions to New Zealand geological studies was a survey of the Otago region on the southern island, known as ‘Hector’s Map’ (ODNB; S. Nathan, ‘James Hector and the First Geological Maps of New Zealand’, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 44 (2014), pp. 88–100). Hooker showed at the meeting
a work on heat: Heat as a Mode of Motion.
Please cite as “Tyndall2045,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on